


Don't want trouble (it finds me)

by readythefanons



Series: The Big Apple [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Daniel Fisher AKA "Danny from Legal", People try to kill Karen, and she still swears a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 10:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6514597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/readythefanons/pseuds/readythefanons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things are ticking along nicely, and then she gets a misaddressed email.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't want trouble (it finds me)

She gets an email with an attachment. She opens it. 

It’s supposed to be a record of the pension fund, but the numbers are completely wrong, off by orders of magnitude. First thing she does, she saves a copy of it on her thumb drive (thank god she still has a thumb drive in her purse). The thumb drive goes into the zippered pouch she keeps emergency tampons in, and that gets shoved to the very bottom of her purse. Then she studies the file some more. Her heart is pounding. She’s freezing. There’s no way this was an accident. _My finger slipped, hit the zero key too many times. Then all my other fingers slipped, entered deposits and withdrawals again and again._ Maybe she shouldn’t have made a copy. Would someone be able to tell? Mr. McClintock comes out of his office holding a folder and strides down the hall, off to his last meeting of the day. One of the other secretaries scurries after him. Karen needs to get out of here, needs to leave.

She doesn’t run away, but she does amble downstairs, and then ambles around the floor, and then she ambles her way over to Danny’s desk. _Oops, my feet slipped._ Her purse is still at her desk, an ember in the back of her mind. She brings Danny a cup of coffee, which he takes gratefully. Her luck is in. His youngest just got accepted into some fancy preschool. The details elude Karen, but Danny’s excited enough that when she says they should go out and celebrate, he agrees. Karen goes back upstairs and her purse is still there, and Mr. McClintock’s office is still empty. She actually does manage to get a little work done. (She is damn good at her job.) 

Mr. McClintock comes back. Karen thinks maybe her luck is holding because he seems as cheerful as he’s ever been, like his meeting went well. 

Her luck isn’t holding. About twenty minutes later he comes to her desk (comes to her desk, doesn’t just summon her or call or any of the other ways he has to communicate without doing it in person) and asks if she got an email with an attachment. She tells the truth. Yes, she did, Mr. McClintock, sir. He tries to feed her some bullcrap about tinkering with a theoretical model. _Lie._ She nods understandingly. He warns her that even opening the attachment was a breach of something something, that she’s lucky she isn’t going to be disciplined. _Threat._ Mr. McClintock has IT wipe her computer. Karen feels vaguely like she’s fallen into a bad dream, like she’ll wake up any second now and none of this will have been real and she can go back to being an underappreciated secretary. She’s glad she’s meeting someone after work instead of heading straight back to her empty apartment. 

There is no graceful way to ask Danny about financial irregularities. She points him in the right direction but keeps it vague. They part ways and the first thing she does when she gets home is hide the thumb drive in the vent above the toilet. She tries to sleep. She has mixed success.

The next couple of days follow a pattern: she goes into the office and works extra hard to cover up her anxiety and sleep deprivation. Mr. McClintock is out for most of the week, and when he’s around they’re both extra polite and extra chipper. Then she goes home, fishes the thumb drive out of its spot, and spends most of the night poring over it and trying to figure out exactly what it means. She’s starting to doubt that it’s only extortion. 

The pattern breaks on Thursday. After her lunch break, she finds a sticky note with “Daniel Fisher” written at the top and a phone number under it. She texts him but doesn’t save the number to her phone. At eleven at night he texts her back. _Found something._ They make plans to meet at the bar again tomorrow. She hopes he has a plan. She’s glad she’s not alone in this.

\--

Karen is kneeling in her apartment, and Danny is there. His blood is seeping into the carpet and she has a knife in her hand. It’s the big one from the set she bought when she got her first apartment. Now the set is ruined because she can’t use this knife again. It was her favorite. She’s vaguely aware that she’s having hysterics. It’s almost a relief when the police break through the door, except that it isn’t, it really isn’t.

\--

She’s sitting in an interrogation room wearing the NYPD-branded clothes they gave her when they took away her (bloody) clothes. The door opens, admitting two of the detectives (Blake and Hoffman, but she doesn’t know which is which) and two strangers. One is tall with dark hair and round glasses. The other is shorter, heavier, with long hair. The shorter one speaks first, asking-demanding the removal of the handcuffs. Karen’s in favor of the notion, even considering the man’s probably asking as a way to establish dominance. Detective Blake-Hoffman asks her who the men are, and before she can answer the dark haired stranger asserts that they’re her lawyers. Karen is sitting in handcuffs in a police station. Now is probably a time to play along. If something somehow manages to go more wrong, well, she’s in a police station; someone will hear her scream. Blake-Hoffman uncuffs her, and he and his partner leave the room.

The dark haired man introduces himself as Matt Murdock and his partner as Foggy Nelson. His voice is quiet and low. Karen has no idea if he always sounds like that or if it’s his talking-to-potential-criminals voice. They sit and try to coax her into speaking. They don’t quite finish each other’s sentences, but they continue each other’s thoughts. It’s the kind of give-and-take that Karen associates with many years of friendship. 

(You never realize how alone you are until you’re sitting in an interrogation room without anyone to call in the state.)

When she finally speaks—“Who the hell are you guys?”—her voice sounds weak, like she’s a little girl. They re-introduce themselves, which is not illuminating. “So what?” she asks, “You’re just a couple of good Samaritans? Today’s just my lucky day?” The joke goes by unremarked, and she really can’t bring herself to give a shit. 

Nelson explains that he bribed the desk sergeant with a box of cigars for his mom, trying to look serious. They are newly minted lawyers. In fact, they are so new that they have unprofessional arguments about how long they’ve been practicing law in front of potential clients. On the other hand, they’re new and eager to have any client at all, even one who can’t pay. Karen figures they’re eager to prove themselves. She’ll take them.

Karen tells them what happened, glossing over the part where she doesn’t really have any friends ( _if ever there’s a time not to labelled a loner, it’s when you have a homicide charge hanging over your head_ ) and skips straight to the heart of the matter. “The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor of my apartment covered in blood. His blood.” Nelson looks down. Karen leans in. She’s stuck in this, and she doesn’t need lawyers who aren’t committed. “I’m not stupid, I know how that sounds. But I am telling you, we _met_ at the _bar. We had a few drinks. Please.”_ Fuck, now she’s crying. Hell. “Please, you have to believe me. _I didn’t kill him.”_ She stops herself there. She’s staring Nelson down, but he won’t meet her eye.

She doesn’t expect Murdock to speak, but he does: “I believe you, Miss Page.” She’s surprised by how badly she needed to hear that. They ask her a few more questions and leave. Karen goes to bed. It’s not yet one in the morning.

Someone tries to kill her. Hand over her mouth so she can’t scream, gets the sheet around her neck despite her struggles. They’re going to kill her and make it look like suicide. Fuck that. If she’s going down, she’s going down fighting. She goes limp. _Fake it fake it._ Her assailant is apologizing, which makes no sense. She goes for his face. _All in._

\--

Nelson and Murdock get her released, which. She’d be a little afraid if they couldn’t, but still. She’s free to go. They make a beeline for the law offices of Nelson and Murdock (sign written on printer paper in somebody’s best handwriting), stopping on the way for a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants from a 24-hour store. While she’s changing, Foggy (“Please, Mr. Nelson makes me feel like somebody’s stuffy accountant.”) scrounges her a cup of tea. Matt (“If you’re going to give him ‘Foggy,’ you might as well call me ‘Matt.’”) starts asking her questions. 

She’s fine until she has to talk about Danny. Whatever this is, the stakes are too high to involve anyone else ( _again_ ). Fuck, she’s crying again. She needs to leave.

Foggy blocks the door. “We can’t advise that, Miss Page.” His words are cold but his voice is kind and his face is worried.

“You don’t understand.” Her words are clipped. She has to make them understand. She can hear her first year acting teacher calling Enunciate! “Either you’re with them or you’re not. And if you’re with them, then I am dead already.” The stakes are too high. “And if you are not, then I cannot have anybody else die because of me.” She can talk about her own death but her voice breaks on the word _die._

“We can protect ourselves, Miss Page,” says the blind man who has not even been a lawyer for twenty-four hours. 

Karen is weak. When Foggy opens his arms to her, she leans against him. She thinks maybe she can have people, just until tomorrow.

\--

So Karen, in general, doesn’t _want_ people. Not for hand holding, not for kissing, not for sex. Sometimes she thinks she does, but almost every time it’s turned out she didn’t want dating-kissing-sex, she just wanted the intimacy that comes from friendship that blurs the line between friends-for-life and de facto family. 

Karen doesn’t want people, except she almost died tonight and she left all her friends-for-life behind when she destroyed her life and had to build a new one. The closest thing she has—had to a friend is Danny, and she murdered him (or killed him or manslaughtered him or what the fuck ever like it _matters_ ). 

Karen’s had sex before. It’s not as good as TV and books would have her believe, but it feels nice enough. Matt’s handsome, and Karen’s shaken and alone, and even a pale imitation of the imitation she misses might be better than nothing.

All this goes through her head on the walk to Matt’s apartment. She needs to get her flash drive from its hiding place, but she’s pretty sure she could sneak out while Matt is asleep even if they have sex. It might even make sneaking out easier.

The rain has soaked through her shirt, but she can use that to her advantage. She’s easing herself into her plan except—Matt seems nice. He’s reserved and a little awkward, but he makes little jokes and Karen changes her mind. Fuck pale imitations of true intimacy. She’s not using their bodies like that. 

When he takes off his glasses she wonders if she could have gone through with it at all. He looks so much more vulnerable without them that she thinks she’d probably had an attack of conscience. Sex and kissing matter to other people, and the handful of people Karen’s hurt by admitting they don’t matter to her is more than enough. She doesn’t want to risk doing that to this man who’s already gotten her out of jail and is putting her up for the night.

Then Matt puts his glasses back on and, with more words than are necessary, he asks her if she kept a copy of the file. Her heart skitters and she remembers Mr. McClintock asking her if she opened an email attachment she shouldn’t have. She told the truth then. Now, she lies.

“Believe me, a part of me wishes I’d made a copy for myself, but I guess I’m just not that smart.” She delivers the line with a vulnerable mouth and her eyes fixed on him like he’s the most wonderful thing she’s ever seen. He smiles crookedly.

“Ah, well,” he says, “it was just a thought.” It occurs to Karen that misdirections that work on most men might not work as well on a blind one. Matt putters around his apartment for a while before getting lying down on the couch. After he’s been still for an hour, Karen sneaks out into the rain.

\--

When she was allowed to wash Danny’s blood off of her skin in the precinct, it came off with appalling ease. A little water and you couldn’t even tell. Her building is similarly unmarked by what happened, but not her apartment. She gives the blood on the carpet a wide berth on her way to the bathroom. It’s almost anticlimactic when she has the thumb drive in her hand.

With impeccable dramatic timing, someone grabs her from behind. He beats her head against the wall. It is the second time in twenty-four hours that someone has attacked her. He has the thumb drive in one hand and a knife in the other. She is resolving to go down fighting (die trying) when her door slams open to reveal a man in a mask. It is no time at all before their struggles send them right through the window. Karen is out of screams. She struggles to her feet, using the wall for support, and staggers down the stairs. 

The man in the mask (and he is a man, his human frailty and exhaustion written in every line of his body) takes the thumb drive and her assailant and dumps them both on the steps of the _New York Bulletin._ Then the man in the mask runs off (slowly at first, pained) until the city’s night swallows him. Karen walks back to Matt’s apartment. He doesn’t stir when she lets herself in.

The next morning Matt and Foggy accompany her to her apartment to pick up clothes (she keeps her eyes away from the wall where she hit her head), and then Matt heads to the offices of Nelson and Murdock while Foggy follows her around the grocery store. Foggy is the one who sees the cover of the _New York Bulletin._ He practically shoves the paper in her face, first exultant and then, when the penny drops, incredulous. He is retroactively afraid for her, which Karen considers sweet if useless. It looks like she’s in the clear, so Karen tells him what happened. It does not take long. When she mentions her head, he makes her wait next to the self-checkout and returns with a chemical ice pack. 

In the illustrious offices of Nelson and Murdock, Foggy tells Matt of her nocturnal adventures while she busies herself in the office’s rudimentary kitchen. Foggy’s voice is high and alarmed, even in the retelling, and Matt’s is so quiet she can barely hear it. She serves them her grandmother’s Family Recipe (it’s a recipe for when she wants to start a family, hence the confusing name). Her grandmother would admonish her for misusing her cooking virtue, but what Karen’s grandmother doesn’t know won’t hurt them. As Foggy and Matt joke and plan, Karen thinks maybe her grandmother was onto something.


End file.
